Yoko Ono

For reasons unknown (at least to me), Secretly Canadian has decided to re-release Yoko One's 1981 album, Season of Glass, today.

Yoko has long been my favorite Beatle.  My personal opinion is that The Beatles' music became much more interesting after her relationship with John Lennon began in 1966. The conventional story (that is, told by conventional people to defend their conventional, bourgeoise tastes) is that she ruined the band and caused them to break up, but The Beatles would have eventually broken up anyway or else become boring and predictable like so many other bands. Impermanence is swift, man, and nothing lasts forever. But if you want to subject yourself to scorn and abuse, try saying something positive bout Yoko to the Beatles gatekeepers on Reddit or Facebook. For the boomer Beatles fans, she's the very definition of "unlistenable" and is to be despised and derided at all times.   

It's also been said that meeting John Lennon was the worst thing that could have happened to the artist, Yoko. She was a conceptual artist, part of the Fluxus movement (George Maciunas, Nam June Paik, Henry Flynt, La Monte Young, John Cage, etc), with gallery shows and conceptual-art performances,  and Lennon attended a preopening viewing in London of one of her gallery shows, titled Unfinished Paintings. One of her pieces was called Painting To Hammer A Nail In, with a hammer attached to a block inviting people to drive nails into a blank canvas. Lennon asked if he could hammer in a nail before the public opening, and Yoko told him, sure, but for five shillings. When Lennon replied, "Well, I’ll give you an imaginary five shillings and hammer an imaginary nail in," that was it - the perfect conceptual response to conceptual art and they fell in love and were together for the rest of Lennon's life. 

I was in my early teens at the time and didn't understand the attraction at all. She wasn't conventionally pretty like I imagined a Beatles' wife to be and when I saw the cover photo of John and Yoko's Two Virgins album with the two of the them stark naked - full-frontal nudity - I thought they had both lost their minds. And when I heard her manic, screaming vocals, I thought it was the worst possible sound in the world rather than understanding it as the appropriate Fluxus/conceptual response to popular music.

But after they met, the Beatles went on to release albums that redefined rock music, landmark records like Sgt. Peppers, The White Album, and Abbey Road. To be sure, their trajectory toward experimentalism and new forms of expression had already begun, but it took off like a rocket after John drove in that nail.

By 1970, though, my taste in music was changing and The Beatles started to sound passe and cliched to me, especially after the release of the ballad-heavy Let It Be. By that time, I had heard Jimi Hendrix and The Doors, and there was no going back to McCartney's Mom-friendly pop songs. But Lennon, especially his solo stuff and the Plastic One Band, still had an edge. 

To be honest, I initially weaponized some of her music, playing Yoko records to freak out friends or to clear out a party if I got tired of hosting guests in the house. But with time, I became fond of my weapons ("This one will really get them") and the more I listened, the more I understood Yoko's vocal stylings. Eventually, I even came to like them. 

That may have laid the groundwork for my later appreciation of free jazz, but I can't quite connect those dots. However, I apparently wasn't the only one to associate Yoko's in-your-face, atonal vocals to the skronk of free jazz.

Season of Glass was the first album by Yoko after Lennon's death, and is a surprisingly conventional affair. Where one might think the artist's reaction to the murder of her husband would be 90 minutes of unbridled, primal screaming, accompanied by frenzied guitar feedback, instead she used a bunch of accomplished studio musicians, including Tony Levin (pre-King Crimson) and jazz musicians Michael Brecker, Ronnie Cuber, and Howard Johnson, to express herself and her grief. Most of the songs if thrown into a playlist today probably wouldn't raise a single eyebrow. 

She's not a great vocalist and has a limited range, but she's no worse than, say, Nico of the Velvet Underground, and if you can accept flat, deadpan vocals from a German blonde fashion model but not a Japanese conceptual artist, you might want to take a self-examination for racism.

Walking on Thin Ice is probably the most outre song on the album and wasn't even included in the 1981 release but later added to the 1997 CD reissue. People who reflexively hate Yoko will find something to object to at about the 2:30 mark and her repeating cries of "ice" (which certainly hits differently now in the age of ICE).